The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne [271]
3. broken winded: suffering from an incurable, fatiguing equine respiratory disease.
4. Yanguesian carriers: Their horses lure the otherwise chaste Rosinante into actions that “all the mares in the pastures of Cordova” were incapable of accomplishing (Don Quixote, 1.3; 1:121).
5. demi-peak’d: Also known as a “flat” saddle, it was half as high as the conventional military saddle (OED, “demi-piqued”).
6. plush: velveteen; cotton with the appearance of velvet.
7. superfine cloth: wool of the best quality (OED).
8. poudrè d’or: gold dust (French), properly poudre d’or.
9. chuck-farthing and shuffle-cap: personifications of small-stakes coin games played by boys (see OED).
10. the true point of ridicule: Sterne used this phrase in a letter to Robert Dodsley offering the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy: “The Plan … is a most extensive one,—taking in … the Weak part of the Sciences, in wch. the true point of ridicule lies.…” (Letters, 74).
11. spare: Like Tristram and Sterne, Yorick is thin. Like both, he suffers from tuberculosis (consumption).
12. false wit: Joseph Addison’s distinctions between “true” and “false” wit in a series of Spectator essays were very popular. No. 61 attacks puns such as Yorick’s.
13. de vanitate mundi et fugâ sæculi: “of the vanity of the world and the flight of time” (Latin). These commonplaces of ascetic Catholicism appeared as the titles of works by such early church Fathers as Gregory of Nazianzus and Hugh of St. Victor.
14. death’s head: a memento mori, a reminder of one’s own mortality. As Yorick contemplates his bony horse’s head, so Tristram in ch. xii, by way of an allusion to Hamlet, will contemplate him.
15. wit and judgment: a familiar pairing in the eighteenth century, which appears a number of times in this book. Cf. Alexander Pope, “For Wit and Judgment often are at strife” (“An Essay on Criticism,” Twickenham 1:248, line 82).
16. clapp’d, or spavin’d, or greaz’d … twitter-bon’d: “Clap” may be a distemper or a swelling of the leg; “spavin” and “twitter-bone” are tumors of the horse’s leg and foot, respectively; “grease” is a secretion of the heel (see OED, which uses Sterne in illustrating all).
17. communibus annis: in ordinary years (Latin).
18. to the very end of the chapter: “through the whole of the subject; to the end, throughout” (OED). This euphemism for death, likening life to a book, is not unique to Sterne.
19. knight of La Mancha … paid a visit to: Don Quixote, with whom, as Florida notes, Sterne himself identified. Ronald Paulson notes in Don Quixote in England: The Aesthetics of Laughter (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998, 151), that the terms “follies,” “love,” and “paid a visit to” echo Corbyn Morris’s Essay towards Fixing the True Standards of Wit, Humour, Raillery, Satire and Ridicule (1744).
20. there is a fatality … will: Florida notes the rough paraphrase of Hamlet: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will” (5.2.10–11).
CHAP. XI
1. YORICK: Yorick (Hamlet, 5.2.173–95), along with Tristram, became an alter ego of Sterne’s, the hero of his Sentimental Journey (1768), in which Yorick is mistaken for old Hamlet’s fool by a French count. Yorick was also the name under which, together with his own, Sterne published his sermons (1760, 1766). It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of Hamlet in Sterne’s work, as the annotation to this chapter should help to make clear.
2. chops and changes … owners: a possible punning allusion to Hamlet’s pun on Yorick’s skull: “Not one now to mock your own grinning—quite chop-fall’n” (5.1.192). Among the editions Sterne was likely to have known, Rowe’s “chop fall’n” (vol. 5, 5.1.182–83) and Pope’s “chop-fallen” (6, 5.1.173–74) would support such a reading, but Theobald’s “chap-fallen” would be understood as synonymous. OED gives Sterne as the first to use “chop” as a noun with this meaning.
3. Horwendillus: the father of Amlethus, who becomes Hamlet in Shakespeare. This reference and the following one come from Lewis Theobald’s general